


Convergence

by argle_fraster



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-19
Updated: 2011-10-19
Packaged: 2017-10-24 19:06:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/266832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/argle_fraster/pseuds/argle_fraster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Slowly, they begin to merge into one person that is neither Anders nor Justice, and the process is like the burn of a searing brand into untainted flesh.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Convergence

Vigil's Keep smells like stale piss and metallic shards of smoldering metal, no matter where one goes. As far as places to live, it's not the most pleasant of sorts, but it's better than the stables. Besides, he's probably not going to stay there much longer, with the business with the Architect completed.

"Not that I'm trying to find a fault here," Anders says, "but really, wouldn't it be easier if you had a body to use that wasn't already dead?"

Sometimes it's best to avert his eyes when looking at Justice. It was alright for awhile, until the body began to seriously decompose, and seeing the sinewy cords of the muscle that are the only strings holding the left arm on- well, it's a bit much, especially when one is supposed to be eating.

"It would," Justice rumbles. "But I have never found a willing host."

There's no underlying current there, but Anders hears it anyway. The moon is bright and full and casting so much light that there are long shadows under the eaves of the outer wall, extending across the ground like spears ready to be thrown.

"Right," Anders says. He doesn't turn to look at his companion. The body's face is little more than a festering mess of clumps that used to be flesh and drawn back skin displaying always visible, yellowing teeth. "Right."

\--

It takes a few days for the idea to bloom into fruition. As one of the stable cats- a tabby with coarse, dark fur that's matted and needs desperately to be washed- licks his fingers to get the last vestiges of offered sweet milk from them, he thinks it over. There's not much time; the Wardens are moving out, and both his charity and his desertion are going to have to happen in the same short timeframe. He knows of the way out from the Wardens. He never wanted to be one in the first place.

It's everything else that worries him, in the back of his mind, like the tickle of a soft breeze.

"What would you do?" he asks the cat, which just mews plaintively at him- the milk is gone. "Right," he says, and reaches to scratch the fur just behind its ears. It allows it for a few moments and then slinks back into the shadows. Anders wonders where it goes during the day. He wonders what it will do once the Wardens clear out, leaving only a small unit behind.

He finds Justice sitting on the uppermost walk, lined with metal spikes and a thin wire.

"If you had a willing host," he begins, without preamble- because if he stops to really think he might think better of the whole thing, and then where would they both be?- "would you take it?"

Justice looks at him without expression, through eyes laid bare with skin peeling back away from the sockets. There is a moment, and then another, and Anders surges forward.

"If I said you could use me, what would you do?"

The spirit is silent. Anders wishes he could read an expression other than long-lost life.

"As a friend," he says, "I think that I... could help you. As a mage."

"You are just a man," Justice says, finally.

Anders has to laugh at that. "Not according to Nathaniel," he replies. "I think the word he used was 'irritating snit'."

"There are many things I do not understand about humans here," Justice tells him, and Anders has heard this before.

"I know," he says.

The spirit flexes boney, almost white fingers in front of him, hands palm-up on his thighs. "There are many injustices here that need to be rectified."

"Starting with the Circle," Anders says.

"Yes," Justice agrees. There is no holding out of his hand, and no emotion inside those too-round eyes. He just looks at Anders, and Anders wonders if the spirit can see everything straight through him.

\--

There is no pain. There is only a small brush of wind and then the roaring force of the Fade, screaming into existence in a place where it had been only whispering before. There is a moment where he feels he cannot breathe, and then nothing. He feels like himself again. The body, now devoid of possession, slumps over on to the ground and one of the fingers finally comes free, dislodging from the rest and skittering across the stones.

There is no pain. At the time, this relieves him. But he should know, like with the Harrowing, that the absence of physical pain does not mean a similar lack of psychological problems.

It takes only three days for the dreams to start.

\--

He sees the Fade. Or, he sees the Fade as it was, as Justice saw it; there is far more color than the Fade Anders saw himself in his Harrowing. There are colors and sounds and smells- smells so strong they permeate the dream and he swears that the festering decay of the Sloth demon is right next to him. He feels heavy, every limb succumbing to the demon's call, and then panic blooms low and hot through his form. He wakes covered in cold sweat, in the back of a merchant's cart filled with unyielding bales of hay.

 _The dreams are not real,_ Justice tells him. _They are neither here nor there. They are merely echoes of a distant place._

"Andraste's fire," Anders gasps, because his own cowl is choking him and cutting off his air. He feels constricted in the cart, but until morning, he can't risk letting go of his source of movement. "How do you deal with them?"

 _They mean nothing to me._

They mean nothing to a spirit who has long since past feeling anything at all, other than the burning sense of purpose. But Anders feels them, right down to his bones, even after he wakes. They stay with him even as the sun is high in the sky, like maggots crawling beneath his skin.

\--

The thing is, he also dreams of Darkspawn. He can't tell which is worse- the Fade, or the Archdemon echoes in his head. Sometimes they mingle and twist together, and then the Fade is full of ravenous Darkspawn that tear his body apart to get inside.

When he wakes, he tries to wash the memories away, but it never works, no matter how cold the water is.

After awhile, he stops trying.

\--

 _Mages are those who have touched the Fade,_ Justice says. _They are human and not human; they are all that remains of an ancient race long before my time. They can still feel and manipulate the energy._

"They are treated like cattle," Anders spits. "Just something to be carted and used as the Templars wish."

Justice stirs, and Anders feels it. It used to cause all the hair on his arms to stand up when the spirit was restless, but now, it seems, his physical form has grown used to the sensation.

 _There is injustice here,_ the spirit agrees.

"You think the mages should be free?" Anders asks. "They should not be kept behind walls and made to do the Templars' bidding. It's better for them to forge their own lives, and make their own decisions."

 _Demons are very persuasive,_ Justice tells him. _Mages are their only connection into your world._

"Every mage has the fortitude and power to say no," Anders says. There is a feeling of heat beneath his fingertips, like he's readying a fireball and simply preparing to aim. It's a magic he's never felt before, and yet has, night after night. It should be terrifying and instead it's simply there. "The human mind is more powerful than any demon."

Justice doesn't reply. But when Anders thinks back on this exchange later, he can only hear the echoed agreement of _'of course'._

\--

Ferelden is a land still struggling to rise from the ashes of the Blight. There's no leaving the Wardens, at least not that Anders has ever heard of, apart from death or the Calling, neither of which is an option he wishes to entertain. So he travels, as far as he can from the center of the land, until they reach the coast and the rocky spread of rocks that cause the surf to roar and split.

There is a dock there, already full of refugees so dead-broke they can't even barter their way into the hull, and two ships sitting out in the harbor on the horizon.

 _There is injustice here,_ Justice tells him, as Anders looks out at the people splayed across the wooden pathways. Some of them are crying. Some of them seem to be past that.

"We cannot change their fate," Anders says. It burns even as he says it; he wishes it were otherwise. He's barely enough coin in his own purse to buy passage, and even that was looted from bodies of those he cut down with the Wardens.

Justice pauses, and there is a hitch- something is strange. It passes, but the spirit still seems different. Subdued. Confused, perhaps, if Anders had to put a name to it. _Yes,_ Justice agrees, though it seems lacking in resolution. _The Circle is of more import._

The captain of the ship is an unwashed, scum-covered sort that spits when Anders approaches him, standing at the end of the dock before the dinghy. He smells of sweat and whiskey.

"Can you pay?" he barks, before Anders has a chance to say anything at all. "Ain't takin' on beggars, and I don't accept nothin' but silver."

"I have your passage fee," Anders says.

The captain only looks over the money enough to count it and be sure it's real, and then he gestures towards the small boat behind him.

"Get in, then," he says.

Anders does, but not before remembering he hasn't asked where the ship is going.

"Somewhere better than here," the captain barks, and then laughs and refuses to say anything more, because there are more refugees approaching and they don't seem to have the coin. Anders sits in the rocking boat with another man, covered in a cloak and smelling of manure.

"Kirkwall," the cloaked man murmurs, and then is silent.

 _Kirkwall,_ Justice echoes against Anders' ears.

\--

They arrive after most of the refugees, but there are still pockets of them scattered around the city- those that couldn't buy their way in, it seems. It hurts to look at them, because Anders wishes he could help, and he can't. There is a woman near where they dock who is holding a tiny bundle that doesn't seem to be moving any longer, and it twists his stomach to watch her rock it and sing a soft lullaby.

 _Injustice, injustice, injustice_ is all he can hear, hammering with the pounding of his heart.

There is no way into the city without coin, and Anders used all of his on the passage over. He waits with the other refugees and listen to them beg and plead and try to coax their way through the guards stationed at the gates. Nothing works. When night falls, most of them fall silent and Anders is unsure if it is from exhaustion or surrender.

Hope is the only currency the refugees know, and so few of them have any of it left.

He waits until everything has quieted down, and casts a cloaking spell on himself. Casting magic feels different now, with the Fade so close to him. Almost like it's stronger, when he does it- stronger, and it almost hurts. It tugs at his blood in a way it never did before. He tries to ignore the sensation. Justice offers nothing on it; it's possible the spirit doesn't feel it at all.

 _Getting into the city is not the problem here_ , Justice says. _This is only a trifling matter. You should be focusing on other, more important things._

"I would get all of the refugees in if I could," Anders whispers, one hand on the stones marking the Gallows. "They have nowhere left to go. They will ship them back to Ferelden."

He feels too much just looking at them. Anger and hopelessness and the pulsing, overpowering desire to do something, to help. At the back of his mind, Justice is prodding him towards the Gallows instead, under the protection of the spell. He can go around the side and up through the docks to get to the underbelly of the city.

The problem is the Gallows themselves.

He gets halfway around the outside before he sees the first Templar. And then he thinks of the Circle, of growing up there. Memories and flashes of laughter and the sharp crack of a sword's blunt edge against the lines of his shoulder blades; hisses and crackles of magic and the thudding, always present hum of his blood, calling to him. He nearly falls from his perch because the onslaught of feelings and images is so overwhelming. Somehow, it's mingled with the bits of the Fade Justice brought with him, and all Anders can feel is pain and misery and an eternity of agony hanging somewhere in the balance.

The feel of fire is back beneath his fingers. It feels nothing like healing spells, and he's always hated it a little bit for that. It's fire and ire and rage, all-consuming, over-powering rage. There is a flash, and then nothing.

His feet hit the stone floor, and he only belatedly realizes he never meant to go down there. There is something propelling him forwards other than his own will; watching himself move is in slow-motion. He thinks of the Mages held within and the bars that might as well be on the windows. Justice shouts something incomprehensible and Anders stumbles forward.

He's lucky that the Templar sees him. A shout of alarm and at least it's dark and he's still half-shrouded by the cloaking spell. There are words on his lips he can't remember telling himself to say aloud, and it's a spell, though he can only tell by the way the magic stirs in his palms.

He doesn't know how he gets out. The next moment of real clarity is stumbling through Lowtown and barely keeping himself upright. He feels so drained he thinks he can barely take another step, and at the same time, so exhilarated that he could cry from the sheer shock of the sensation. His hand hits the damp, rank wall of one of the warehouses and he stumbles.

 _Mages, injustice, prison, tranquil_ , it's like a mantra inside his head and he can't tell which thoughts are his and which are from Justice.

It doesn't really matter. After awhile, after lying against the wall struggling to reorient himself in the maze of the city he doesn't know, the words all blur together, and the only thing he can make out is _vengeance, vengeance, vengeance_ even after his heartbeat finally recedes once more.

\--

Lowtown is full of the worst kinds of people and the most pitiable. He's enough coin to at least get some stale bread from one of the vendors at the bazaar. He doesn't wish to stay in Lowtown, but there are not a lot of other places to go.

 _You can fix this,_ Justice tells him. Anders wonders when the words of a friend began to feel like the sickly sweet promises of a demon. _You can fix what is wrong with this place._

"Starting with the Circle," Anders replies.

It's hollow, anyway. He falls asleep outside one of the warehouses. When he wakes, he sees an image of a Templar and a patrol squad. He is slumped on the Docks, in an alley he has never seen before. Just trying to get to his feet causes him to retch, and his stomach is too empty for it to be much more than bile.

He doesn't know how he got there. The only thing he can taste all day is acid.

 _Justice_ , the spirit demands. _Justice._

\--

If possible, Darktown is even worse than Lowtown is. It's mostly refugees and reeks of filthy and neglect. Squatters have taken up residence in nearly every corner. It takes a long time to find a spot they haven't already claimed, but he finally manages. It's a small building that seems to have long been deserted. The inside is covered with more filth than the outside is.

His first night there, Anders dreams of the Archdemon. He hears the call of the Darkspawn from the Deep Roads beneath the earth and wakes with the echoes still in his ears.

He wonders if the taint in his blood is something that Justice can feel.

It takes him awhile to realize that he hears the spirit less and less.

\--

"Please, messere," the girl pleads. The skin around her eyes is yellow from malnutrition and disease. She's as skinny as they come, knobby arms and legs still struggling with a growth-spurt that starvation has denied her. Anders has seen her before, outside his hovel. He thinks she is one of the child refugees. Perhaps she was orphaned before she came to Kirkwall, perhaps after. He doubts it matters now.

She holds out her hands in front of her. She's begging for food.

"Here," Anders says. He doesn't have much, but he can't turn her away. She can't be older than eleven or twelve, but she looks no larger than nine.

She eats the stale bread far too quickly. Later, he finds her again just a ways out from his door, weeping into her hands. From the way she's shaking, it's obvious that she vomited up everything from eating it too fast.

He can't heal her hunger. But he can heal the cuts on her bare feet and the inflammation in her stomach from the shock.

Afterwards, she won't stop thanking him. She's babbling. She's going to alert the whole of Darktown with her crying, but Anders can't find it in himself to care. Healing her was the first thing he'd done in a long time that hadn't left him cold.

\--

He never asks for money from the refugees. Some of them offer and he has to turn them away. One day, one of them pays him in information- the man tells him that there was a mage asking about him, asking about the healer in Darktown. A mage named Karl.

Anders doesn't sleep that night. Karl is in Kirkwall, in the Circle. He hasn't seen Karl since before he escaped the Circle- the _fourth_ time.

 _It is nothing,_ Justice tells him, over the crackle of the fire. _He is inconsequential. Finding him will not bring vengeance to those who cry for it._

Anders isn't sure when everything became about vengeance.

"He is not inconsequential to me," he murmurs.

Justice has nothing else to say.

\--

The orphans in Darktown begin to call his hovel the "clinic". Word gets around to the other refugees. Anders knows that eventually the Templars will catch wind of the mage healing Fereldans near the sewers, but he can't be bothered to tell the children to be quiet about it. Soon, everyone begins calling it that.

Then the first thug shows up outside his door.

\--

Anders doesn't remember what happened with the thug. He remembers the shout and the glint of the knife; it's one of those things that the Wardens have instilled in him, the survival instinct. After that, there is nothing but the roar of anger and bitterness and the feeling of rage that anyone would bother going after a healer helping refugees. He pieces together things as he stares at the man's broken body once clarity returns, but there are still pieces missing. His palms are tingling as if he cast multiple spells and upon the realization, he goes to check the side of the building. There are scorch marks there, faint among the rest of the grime, but noticeable.

He doesn't remember casting any fire spells. He isn't sure what to do with the body. In the end, he just piles it in among the dead that seem to end up in every corner of Darktown's corridors. It looks like all the rest, only burned and disfigured. He hopes no one looks close enough to suspect an apostate more than they already do.

 _He deserved what he got,_ Justice says.

"Did he?" Anders asks, feeling weak. He can barely stand. "I don't even know what he got."

 _He got justice,_ the spirit tells him.

It feels like a lie. It feels more like vengeance, and Anders thinks, eventually, he will stop being able to tell the difference.

\--

He still dreams of the Fade. He still dreams of Darkspawn. It is only on nights he doesn't sleep that he doesn't dream at all.

\--

On the day he prepares himself to go to the Gallows to seek out Karl- or at least information about Karl within the Circle- he pulls out an uneven, lopsided metal bowl and fills it with milk from the bazaar. There's a skinny, flea-covered cat outside that roams around after dark, and lately, he's been seeing it skirt around his corner of the city.

"C'mere," Anders tells it, as he sets the bowl down on the ground just outside his door. The cat seems wary, but too hungry to really resist. Her fur is matted when Anders' fingers make contact with it. She lets him pet her as she laps up the offered meal.

"I shouldn't give you a name," he tells her, and she just sort of purrs. "When I name you, that means you'll probably die. You know that's what happens with things I care about."

The cat is unconcerned with this. She only cares about the bottom of the bowl, which she's already gotten to.

"I know," Anders says. "But I guess I can't change who I am."

She's finished with him, but she'll come back later. He knows she will. She's starving, and he's offering. The children will scare her off during the day, but after nightfall, he will see her again.

"We'll both come back tonight, then," he tells her. Her tail drags along the dirt behind her as she leaves. "Until then, Mistress Paws."

He doesn't bother to lock up. There's nothing to lock besides a few straw cots.

 _This is foolish,_ Justice says. _What solace can you find in an old friend locked away by the Templars?_

"I don't know," Anders replies. "I don't know."

 _This is not where you should be expending your efforts._

There's no way to drown him out, so Anders doesn't even try. He stopped trying a long time ago.


End file.
